Wednesday, September 19, 2007

How many more innocents must die to satisfy the Bush regime's blood hunger? Blackwater and other mercenary contractors indiscriminately kill anyone that invades their perimeter and the Bush regime, having lost the ability to operate on the ground in many areas, increasingly relies on air strikes to attack their targets.

According to various sources the estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from about 80,000 by Iraq Body Count to 655,000 according to a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet to 1.2 million(!) according to another study published by ORB, a British polling firm. You decide. Suffice it to say the innocents pay the highest price.

And that doesn't count the displaced. 4 million have fled their homes; 2 million outside Iraq and anther 2 million internally. That's 16% of the population. Imagine 48 million Americans displaced and you get the idea. 24 million fleeing to Canada or Mexico and the other half going out to the countryside to get away from the violence in the cities.

Nearly 4,000 Americans are dead and another 30,000 are injured many so badly they will never have a normal life.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The link above is to an article by Tony Karon, a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts.

He writes: "I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel."

Having lived in Saudi Arabia much of my life and being familiar with the history of the oil industry in that country this rings very true. The first oil companies in Arabia were Standard of California (Chevron) and later Texaco, Mobil and Exxon. In the early 1930s Standard of California signed an agreement with the Saudi King Abdel Azziz granting it exclusive rights to explore, drill for and produce oil giving the consortium of the four American oil companies which came to be known as ARAMCO, ownership of the Saudi oil. In turn ARAMCO paid the Saudis a royalty for each barrel they sold. In the beginning it was something on the order of 25 cents a barrel. Remember, oil was $2.50 a barrel back then. This arrangement lasted until the early 70s when the Saudi Government began a transition to full ownership of the county's natural resources, where ARAMCO, the company my father worked for, for nearly 30 years, became a contractor to the Saudi government to produce the oil.

The difference between the Saudi/American agreement in the 1930s and what is now occurring in Iraq is that in the 1930s no one knew for sure if there was oil in Arabia, not to mention there weren't 160,000 American soldiers in Arabia. The Americans took a very big risk and didn't find oil until after many millions in investments and a couple of years of drilling with the 7th well in Dhahran. Much of the oil in Iraq has been found and with present day techniques the rest won't be that difficult to find. The so called oil "sharing" law is a giveaway/payback to the American oil industry. One could argue and some of the more honest supporters of the war do, that since we spent our national treasure and blood to "secure" these oilfields we have a right to the profit from our "investment." I disagree. It belongs to the Iraqi people and unless we want to continue to fuel more anger, resentment, insurgency and terrorism against us for many years we should withdraw and let the Iraqi's run their own show. If they want to hire Chevron et. al to help produce this oil that's fine but don't pressure them at the barrel of a gun to grant ownership to non-Iraqi companies.

John V. Whitbeck says in a Christian Science Monitor Op-Ed piece on Friday Sept. 14th that "...Israelis have immense psychological problems in coming to grips with the practical impossibility of sustaining forever what most of mankind views as a racial-supremacist, settler-colonial regime founded upon the ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population."

Saying the only way to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and therefore the rest of the Arab world is a one-state solution with universal suffrage. He also compares Israel to South Africa saying that:

"The world also recognized that the solution to that problem could not be found either in "separation" (apartheid in Afrikaans) and scattered native reservations (called "independent states" by the South African regime and Bantustans by the rest of the world) or in driving the settler-colonial group in power into the sea. Rather, the solution had to be found – and to almost universal satisfaction was found – in democracy, in white South Africans growing out of their racial-supremacist ideology and political system and accepting that their interests and their children's futures would be best served in a democratic, non-racist state with equal rights for all who live there."

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Something I've been saying for a long time. The "Downing Street memo" was one of the early indications. The stories about "Curveball" that began appearing after the aggression. Amb. Joseph Wilson's Op-Ed in the NYT about the fiction of Iraq buying yellowcake from Niger and other stories and "confessions" of departed administration officials from Paul O'Neil to Richard Clarke weave an extremely convincing argument that Bush, Cheney and the rest of their cabal are damn liars and deserve to be impeached, convicted and imprisoned for taking this country to war under completely false pretenses, for the death and maiming of 30,000+ Americans and upwards of 1 million Iraqis. How much more evidence do we need to begin the proceedings?

This article from Salon is another nail in the coffin of lies of the Bush administration. When will the American people wake up and hold this man and his henchman Dick Cheney accountable?

Do American Presidents get to drag the nation into war under completely false pretenses and get away with it?

My analysis is the Democrats don't want to because if they don't have the votes to end the war or cut off funding they probably don't think they have the votes for this. Maybe so but perhaps if the evidence were laid out in hearings people might change their minds. The other caveat is political calculation. They don't wish to "get any on them" or appear vindictive during impeachment hearings and diminish their chances of victory in 2008. Plus they want a really good issue to run on and it doesn't get any better than a failed war for that!